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For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on.
Tens of thousands of queer women are expected to take to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to celebrate the women who fought for their right to celebrate safely and to declare equal rights for all. Some will also be there to condemn the state of Israel, as organizers of the renowned Dyke March insist for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism has become a core value of the event.
But the bitter internal fight that shift sparked last year has vanished, along with many of the march’s longtime Jewish participants. Many will attend a separate event on Saturday hosted by Shalom, Dykes, a group created in 2024 by former Dyke March participants who have been shut out of the celebration.
“There has been an exodus,” said Nate Shalev, who spent a decade on the march’s organizing committee. Shalev stepped down when the organizers turned on them and other Jewish supporters of Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks. “Anyone who has dissented, anyone who has any sort of connection to Israel, anyone who is quote unquote not a good Jew.”
Dyke March organizers reject the notion that the march’s anti-Zionist stance disproportionately excludes Jews.
“We have Jews on the NYC Dyke March committee, and we do not believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic,” organizers told the Forward in a statement.
The split reflects broader fractures in queer spaces nationwide, as Pride Marches from Vermont to San Francisco have also splintered over positions on Israel and Gaza in recent years.
In New York, that divide now feels permanent. After getting doxxed and ousted from their roles, activists who once pushed back on the march’s anti-Zionist stance say they have given up on making change from the inside, instead directing their energy toward queer Jewish spaces.
“There’s this feeling of, where do we want to put our energy?” Shalev said. “Fighting against these folks who clearly don’t care about me or my communities, and don’t have the desire to be able to see multiple perspectives or truths, that’s not worthwhile.”
‘Settled in for the long haul’
Shalev, whose wife is Israeli, said the organizing committee debated for years whether the march would ban national flags — and by extension, the Jewish pride flag with a Star of David. But the committee allowed for open discussion, Shalev said, and they never ended up banning the flags.
That culture changed after Oct. 7, 2023, when Shalev said fellow organizers showed little understanding of the personal toll the attacks had taken.
“Here I was, post-October 7 with my Israeli wife, navigating all of this in our home, trying to understand if her friends and family were OK,” Shalev said. “And then having to navigate this with the Dyke March committee.”
A year later, an attempt at reconciliation was short-lived. In June 2024, the Dyke March Instagram account put up a post acknowledging that the committee’s delay in condemning the attack of Oct. 7 had caused harm and insisting that “unequivocal solidarity and empathy for Jewish safety can coexist alongside unwavering commitment to Palestinian safety and freedom” — then removed it after a half hour.
Organizers’ reason for deleting the post, they wrote in a subsequent post, was that “any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperial agenda is harmful to all.”
The 2024 march — dubbed “Dykes Against Genocide” — raised funds for five groups including Within Our Lifetime, a group that voiced support for Hamas after Oct. 7 and defends “the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”
That same year, Shalev co-founded Shalom, Dykes, a group that describes itself as a place where “Jewish dykes can exist fully and freely as themselves, no questions asked.”
What began as a one-off alternative to the Dyke March quickly became something larger. Roughly 300 people attended the group’s first celebration with dancing and a performance by drag queen Matzah Belle Soup at an East Village bar, scheduled at the same time as the Dyke March.
“I definitely thought it was going to be a one-time event,” Shalev said. “Immediately during and after that event, I understood that this was actually much, much larger than I thought.”
Even after the split, Shalom, Dykes encouraged members who wanted to attend the Dyke March to do so together. But two years on, Shalev said, fewer people are interested in reengaging with the Dyke March, while Shalom, Dykes has continued to grow.
One of those attendees was Amy Vernon, who came out as bisexual at age 50 and said she was still finding her footing in queer communities when she attended her first Dyke March in 2023. Marching proudly through the streets surrounded by thousands of queer women was an “electric feeling,” she said.
But the following year, the march’s statements about Zionism made Vernon feel like she couldn’t attend. Shalom, Dykes gave her an alternative.
“It really just felt like this lifeline,” Vernon said. “Because I was still trying to figure out where I even belonged anymore.”
Last year’s Shalom, Dykes dance party drew about 600 attendees — double the turnout of its first event — and the group has expanded into a year-round community, hosting holiday celebrations and happy hours.
“We’ve reached the point where we’re settled in for the long haul,” Vernon said. “I don’t know what future there is for American Jewry if we can’t eventually build bridges back, but to my knowledge, there is no interest from the Dyke March or other queer organizations to welcome us back.”
Dissenters depart
Founded in 1993 by a group of activists called the Lesbian Avengers, the Dyke March — which unlike New York’s Gay Pride parade the following day takes place without corporate sponsorship, permits, or police presence — originally had a strategically narrow focus: lesbian visibility. By separating themselves from male-dominated parades, the Avengers sought to specifically highlight women’s issues.
Today, organizers frame the Dyke March through a broader, intersectional lens. Its “statement of values” includes not only “anti-Zionism” but also “anti-militarism,” and standing “in solidarity with all oppressed peoples and occupied lands, including Palestine” among its many priorities.
According to Shalev, the change in approach reflected the exodus of dissenting voices in recent years, which left the committee without the intergenerational perspective that had long characterized the march.
By 2025, committee member Jodi Kreines found herself as the lone voice opposing a proposal to reaffirm the march’s anti-Zionist commitments.
“The only qualification was you had to identify as a dyke, and that was really what I was holding to,” said Kreines, who has been marching for two decades. “The idea that creating an explicitly anti-Zionist message would be really exclusionary of a large swath of dykes, especially within New York City.”
After Kreines voiced her concerns about the group’s anti-Zionist stance in the Forward last year, the committee voted to remove her in a 15-2 vote.
Kreines said she never shared her personal opinions about Israel with the committee. Her argument, rather, was that the march should remain open to all dykes regardless of their beliefs.
“You don’t get to determine who is a good dyke or a bad dyke, just as you don’t get to determine who is a good Jewish person or who is a bad Jewish person,” Kreines said. “There is no one way to exist.”
Other Jewish activists who challenged the committee’s anti-Zionist stance last year faced similar treatment, including Judith Kasen-Windsor, the widow of legendary gay rights activist Edie Windsor — the lead plaintiff in the landmark marriage equality case at the Supreme Court. Kasen-Windsor was also told she was no longer welcome at any Dyke March planning or organizational meetings.
“It was our community, and now it’s not our community anymore,” Kasen-Windsor told Gay City News after she was ousted from her role.
Dyke March organizers did not address questions about the committee’s process for removing members or their tolerance for dissent, instead directing the Forward to their “value statement” on Zionism.
“We oppose the nationalist political ideology of Zionism, particularly as it is promoted within U.S. institutions, which continues to be used to subjugate, displace, and marginalize Palestinian people,” the document reads. “We stand against antisemitism in all its forms and recognize that Jewish people have faced historical and ongoing oppression. Our critique is directed at a political system and ideology, not at Jewish people or Judaism.”
Kreines decided not to fight the committee’s decision.
“I needed to choose to protect my peace,” Kreines said. “I was not in any place that I had the capacity to fight anymore.”
The post For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on. appeared first on The Forward.
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Democratic socialists scored big primary wins. But that’s not the whole story.
(JTA) — A string of U.S. House primary successes for democratic socialists, most of whom are sharp Israel critics, was hailed as a major shift in party politics over the course of the summer. But now that the primaries have concluded, a full picture of the results shows that the group’s victories were concentrated in House races in the deepest-blue districts, while few politicians have scored wins in Senate races.
During the primary season, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won seven out of the 25 U.S. House primaries in which they competed, securing two wins in Michigan, one in Colorado, three in New York and one in Pennsylvania, according to the DSA’s vote tracker. However, these wins have all occurred in Democratic strongholds: New York City, Detroit, Denver and Philadelphia.
“It’s a little bit dangerous to overinterpret a handful of elections compared to all the others,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Calling the DSA the new big kid on the block is a little bit premature.”
In addition to the seven DSA primary winners, another DSA candidate who ran in a California nonpartisan primary advanced to a U.S. House runoff against a Democratic incumbent in November. Two additional democratic socialists, from Kansas and New Hampshire, withdrew before their respective House primaries.
Of the DSA’s 18 House primary losses, seven occurred in deep-blue areas – demonstrating that even in the country’s most progressive pockets, democratic socialists often weren’t popular. These defeats notably included one in St. Louis, where incumbent Wesley Bell trounced DSA firebrand and anti-AIPAC crusader Cori Bush.
Granted, the DSA victories are still unprecedented in a country where socialism has long been anathema. The candidates might have only succeeded in deeply Democratic districts – but that means they are all but assured victory on Election Day. Taken together, they’ll constitute a larger contingent in Congress than ever before.
Many of the DSA candidates made Israel and its supporters central issues during their campaigns, and there’s little doubt that their presence will tilt the Democratic caucus in the Congress further away from Israel.
The DSA’s official stance on Israel includes an end to the country’s “colonization and occupation of all Arab lands,” the “self-determination of the Palestinian people” and the cessation of “U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.” Although the DSA has won fewer races than it has lost, the victories would more than triple the group’s presence in the U.S. House, with five newcomers in addition to Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, said that supporters of Israel should be concerned by the wins, even if they don’t constitute a wave.
Robbins, who also served as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, warned that if anti-Israel DSA politicians keep racking up wins, Democratic strategists will discourage candidates from supporting Israel’s response to Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks.
Recommending any action to the contrary, he argued, will result in “the quickest campaign you’ve ever seen.”
“It will be over before you can say ‘the Golan Heights’,” Robbins quipped.
And yet, although the media spotlight has shone on the DSA’s standout victories, establishment candidates have secured more wins at the ballot box from a numerical perspective. In addition, democratic socialists have focused more on the House than the Senate, where they would need to appeal to broader statewide electorates to win seats.
One major exception to that rule is Florida DSA member Angie Nixon, who pulled off a stunning primary victory in a state that Trump won by about 13 percentage points in 2024. But she didn’t join the DSA until shortly before the election and she didn’t get its endorsement.
Another DSA Senate candidate, Gregory Levy of Ohio, will be running in the November general election as an Independent.
But the three other staunchly progressive Senate candidates who will be on the Democratic ballot in November – in Maine, Michigan and Minnesota – don’t define themselves as democratic socialists. While many are still highly critical of Israel, they have differences with DSA and are more interested in making sure they appeal to the more politically diverse populations they will face statewide. They face close races where swing voters who don’t identify strongly with either party are likely to make the difference.
For instance, though many of Abdul El-Sayed’s positions are similar to DSA policies, last month he told The Wall Street Journal that he is “not technically or practically DSA” and that he doesn’t oppose capitalism. At the same time, he has earned the support of many democratic socialist politicians, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Kamarck observed that Michigan, which has a huge Arab-American population, remains the nerve center of the Democratic Party’s pro-Palestinian movement. Yet although polls forecast a landslide victory for El-Sayed, who sharply criticized Israel throughout his primary campaign, she termed his victory in early August as “a squeaker.”
“It was a one-point race,” she said. “What that says is that this is not finished.”
Haile Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement at the time that although her group was disappointed in El-Sayed’s victory, his “razor-thin margin isn’t the resounding win for the far-left that was predicted.”
An Economist model issued shortly after El-Sayed’s victory predicted that the Democratic Party’s chances of winning in November fell to 48% following the primary. But a Marist poll published on Wednesday gave El-Sayed a seven-point lead over Republican Mike Rogers, with a 3.8% margin of error.
Meanwhile, post-primary predictions showed that Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan would secure an easy victory in her blue state’s Senate race. However, a new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll found that her five-point lead over Republican Michele Tafoya had narrowed to a statistical tie. Like many party progressives, Flanagan has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
As for Maine’s Jackson, the progressive was trailing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a five-term incumbent, by 3 points, with a 3.1% margin of error, according to an AARP poll released on Thursday.
Nixon in Florida was 11 points behind Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, with a 4% margin of error, a Stetson University from late last month poll found. On the other hand, St. Pete Polls placed the candidates in a dead heat just the week before, giving Moody just a 0.3-point edge, with a 3.2% margin of error.
In a testament to the growing power of the DSA – even in a red state – Moody reportedly told Fox News Radio this week that she is “seeing way-too-close-for comfort polls in many Republican Senate races.”
And in an email blast sent the same day, according to Florida Politics, Moody warned that “the polls have been all over the place.”
“Some have us up. Two have us tied,” she wrote. “We’re in the final stretch, where everything we do, and your support, really matters.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Democratic socialists scored big primary wins. But that’s not the whole story. appeared first on The Forward.
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The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.
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Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium appeared first on The Forward.
